D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

i wouldn't mind being pointed at them

forks et al this is on apple music now as an album... very high quality recording obv, he & the band sound amazing

well he didn't actually have a band for it, it's just him on keys + a dj playing backing tracks + a few guests here and there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfGw4LWg3ec

full performance is here

ah, well nonetheless

Good but not amazing. The show I saw on That last tour he did with a band was pretty amazing though

This really was the best album of the decade

thanks

hm, really hard to get a sense of how much of this is live based on this youtube; never a fan of backing tracks

shout out to target

meth and red tho!

It would be cool if they just said fuck it and shot in landscape mode

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

I still listen to it all the time. Total classic.

He might take forever but hes obv getting better each time out. Hoping that continues. Another life is still absolutely incredible and beautiful. I'd personally prefer if 1000 deaths didnt have the sampled speech at the start as I don't need that in my life but that track I never get bored of. Hope he keeps working with kendra foster too.

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

Yes. Also, the show on this tour was the best show.

Was reviewing an album with a George Floyd-referencing track on it yesterday and thinking about how the song was totally fine, stirring and moving, but still not a patch on The Charade, and how graceful and powerful and sad that track is, while still being a gossamer-light 3 minute pop song. He's a genius. What he does is magical.

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

Yes. Also, the show on this tour was the best show.

Yes to both, without question.

This not only still sounds fresh to me but it still sounds ahead of our time. There are musical and sonic layers I'm still discovering. I'm also appreciating him more as a lyricist. IDK if I can even call it a defining record bc there's nothing else like it.

Now that the 2010s are over, can we say this was the best album?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive),

This really was the best album of the decade

― akm, Sunday, March 14, 2021 4:42 AM (two months ago)

yeah it's a masterpiece

i feel like even though it was so highly praised it's still underrated in some weird way?

possibly because it came out so late in the year when it was released? didn't get the chance to top all the 2014 lists and by 2015 kendrick dropped to pimp a butterfly, the other album of the decade

i think black messiah has aged better, tbh

Is it blasphemy to say that it’s his best album (so far)?

Nah, they're all classic in their own way, but Black Messiah is the one I've been reaching for since it came out.

Black Messiah is amazing but Voodoo > Brown Sugar > Black Messiah

i like this album a lot but voodoo is still the one for me, easily. i prefer brown sugar to this, as well.

or yah what murgatroid said.

last three posts otm

I don't have strong feelings about the ranking of them, but if your third best album is still the best album of the decade it came out in, that's a strong career

I prefer it to Voodoo and Brown Sugar because it's weirder and I like weird

i just prefer the smoother edges of r&b

id have to think about it but im not sure id have this in my top ten r&b releases of the last decade. trying not to poopoo on it too much cos i do like it. i just dont have near the level of reverence for it as others.

black messiah may be more psychedelic than voodoo but i don't think it's significantly weirder

Voodoo is more insular and murky and detailed (and it was my fav album for years), but Black Messiah has better songs and is a synthesis of everything that makes him great imo

idk maybe it's just because i'm always stoned when i listen to it but voodoo takes funk to such an interior space that it's a deeply weird album to me, psychedelic without literally being psychedelic bc it's pushing a form to its absolute limit and beyond xp

"but Black Messiah has better songs"

idk about all that

i think there's aspects of black messiah where i could see one gravitating to it depending on taste -- there's a darkness to it and a sort of unsettled itchiness where it's almost at once belabored and unfinished, some tracks feel like semi-thoughts where others feel so worked over that the instrumentation swallows up his vocals. on the other hand voodoo is warmer and intensely perfected, everything is in its right place even as the production makes the songs feel like the substance holding them together is almost gelatinous. of course this is its singular brilliance. personally i think voodoo is the clearly superior record and so i once again bash the button next to my computer that says "brad otm" ... i really just think it's one of the most perfect albums of all time, i can't imagine basically anyone improving upon it let alone the guy who made it. but it's cool that black messiah connects the thread while also standing on its own in a number of ways

Voodoo feels like the apotheosis of a genre that it also more or less defined. Black Messiah feels like an album that exists outside of genre and is kind of too out there and proggy and inherently sui generis to inspire a lot of similar albums. I like each for its own reason, more likely to put on BM than Voodoo though.

a lot of nice words here even when I'm not sure how much of them I agree with

i'm inclined to go with voodoo still but I listened to it so much as a teen before BM came out so I may be over/underrating them accordingly. all 3 are amazing ofc

otoh I never warmed to the godawful meth & red verses lack of which is def a point in BM's favour

ok so this album is fucking amazing

black messiah is usually my favourite but voodoo is near perfect too. i think it just comes down to black messiah being a more direct work, the songs are easier to grasp despite still being so dense.

Lot of hyperbole in this thread

he's that fucking good

it was the most justifiable hyperbole of the 21st century

But the right ranking is BM, voodoo, brown sugar obv. Bm is where voodoo couldn't get to yet. Voodoo has great ambience, sounds incredible sonically, but it can be a bit, idk, stilted, like hes running high on studio craft and label budget but lower on proper direction and inspiration. Its a transitional album, d'angelo leaving neo soul to enter his own sound. Erykah badu got to where he wanted to quicker with mama gun.

Voodoo is vibier, bm is songier

BM is still pretty damn vibey.

i suppose, but the emphasis is on each song being entirely its own thing, self contained, not sounding like anything else on there, whereas with voodoo it sounds like the product of a lot of studio improv and jamming and then extensive production labouring and attention to sonic details

Brown Sugar still his best imo. I get how BM's murk is the point, inseparable from his aims, which makes it an ideal album to slap on while cooking dinner.

with voodoo theres a lot more sonic cohesion, a lot of the same sounds, whereas BM doesnt have that. nothing else souunds like 1000 deaths or uses those same sounds for example. another life is all on its own.

"Brown Sugar still his best imo."

what lol

Listened to this for the first time in a while last night. Can't believe it's coming up to six years old already.

I must admit that while I enjoy a good amount of this record, it's one of these records I admire more for its vision, prowess and execution than something I'd listen to all the way through for fun.

Maybe it's because it was my intro to D'Angelo and I wasn't formally familiar with his work prior to it.

The first three tracks I find especially hard - so murky and claustro, just busy and packed-in. By the time Sugah Daddy rolls round, it really hits its stride. I love that one, and Really Love and The Door. The lighter, less busy tracks I guess.

I'm impressed with anyone who can discern much from his lyrics on this one. To me, the way his vocals are processed and produced make them become another instrument in the endlessly evolving wall-to-wall funky squall of the thing that he may as well be scatting the whole way through. I wouldn't have put it past him, but still it was perhaps surprising to look up the lyrics to Charade and find out how deep and complex they are. Now it feels like there are codes weaving in and out of this music which aren't really accessible to my ears